作者： wangxiaohu

I’ve got another request to be added as a friend on Facebook. I joined Facebook last year. Now I have 66 friends so far. I do couple of checks everyday on Facebook and even get updated through SMS on my cellphone. According to the website itself,

Facebook launched in February of 2004 and the website now has over 19 million active users across over 47,000 regional, work-related, collegiate and high school networks

Here are few things I like about this social network website:

1. People are real.
   Everyone on Facebook has to get either a college email or a work email in order to register, where obtaining the college or work email is already an identification process per se. Therefore people to be added are not just a ID or nickname. This is very much different from forum like communities.
2. Efficient user classification.
   There are two types of classifications on Facebook, which are networks and groups. The concept of network is pretty much like community in expo.live.com, that only people with specific email can be in the network defined by the domain of that email. Whereas for groups, which are less formal than networks, people can join together by interests or purely no topic.
3. Extensibility
   Facebook provides a light library of APIs for developers to re-use the existing information. Any Facebook application redirect the user to the authentication gateway on the official site. After user is identified, the application runs on the third-party website or client computer can obtain necessary information of that user, such as friends list, to do something like Friends Visualizer .

But, Facebook does not really rock. It just manages the friend list in an interesting way. What I can’t imagine, is that if someone can come up with a combination of all three websites: Facebook, Douban (see previous post) and expo.live.com. That will be interesting.

BTW, the support of international characters in Facebook takes points off a lot.

最近老是不务正业，稀罕上了 PowerShell。随便打了几个脚本来耍耍，结果无心插柳柳成荫，发现可以用来简化工作中的一些问题。Lead 很高兴，问我有没有空把这个东西走一个小讲座，给团队的人上上课。小的一新人，受宠若惊。三人行必有我师，公司在这方面做的很好。只消能够提高工作效率，便可拿来提倡和传播。然后，Lead 说让我去跟团队里面的几位长老跑跑腿，精进一下测试构架方面的东西，自然是让洒家满心欢喜地给答应了。喝了两口小水，回办公室就把几个小虫给则个了，得意洋洋的表情很遭人呼哧。听说大老板最近在清华整了个名誉学位，还打算在国内扎几个营。小王同志，好好整。改明咱也混个小 Lead 当当，弄辆小车开开，还必须得是 ABS 防暴死的。

嘿，瞧这小算盘打的，噼里啪啦乱响。天黑了，白日梦也该醒了。去公司厨房寻摸几听百事可乐，回家炒菜吃米饭去……

It’s such a romantic place.

 

A little story from one of my friends about the front door of his home.

Day 1:

It is very annoying that every time I go back home, I have to insert the key into the door lock in order to get in. How come it doesn’t know that I am the person who lives here? I will get into my home anyway, so the step of opening the door by the key is really unnecessary. No, I don’t like the smartcard and fingerprint neither. I just want to do nothing. OK, I’m going to disable this feature, so It should be always open to me.

Day 2:

I just got everything in my home stolen! How come my front door let others to get in? It is so insecure! It should know I am the only person who lives here! No one should be allowed to be here. What? I need to turn on the feature I just disabled? But I don’t like that feature. It’s annoying. OK, I hope the company making that damn door hear what I am saying. If they are not going to improve this door, I am going to switch to another door product that doesn’t require any authentication to get in and also disables others from getting in.

Sigh…

之前删了下面的一些话，是因为想到 Seven 曾经评价我是自卑与自信并重，生怕贴出来再有人跳出来给我扣一个自恋的帽子。后来想想，打自己的字，让别人说去吧。

十几年前养过一只很小的小狗，叫多多。我很喜欢跟多多玩。有一次它想爬到沙发上，可是沙发太高，它爬不上来。每次都在快到达上面的时候掉下去。多多很沮丧，不过它还是决定做最后一次尝试。在它马上又要滑下去的时候，我用手推它——朝它滑下去的方向。多多很着急，就更加用力。结果我一松手，它就冲到了沙发上。人也一样，经常都要去攀爬新的高点。我相信，挫折和打击比鼓励可以更加促进一个人的成长。我明白，并不是什么时候都会有鼓励这种东西存在。人生苦短，我们没有时间去感慨去追忆然后前进。只有更快地赶超自我，因为自我才是最大的敌人，其它一切如空气。

遇到新的阻力，有些人兴奋，有些人沮丧。世界其实就是由这两种人组成。属于哪一种人，完全取决于自己。我有一些很有想法的朋友，我看得出来他们是今后的精英。遇到这样的朋友，从某些角度来说我会很害怕，因为我看到的是竞争力。但我很庆幸我能看到这样实力的人群存在，而有这样的朋友确实很让人开心。每天早晨醒来，想到有这样一批未来精英的存在，都会无比兴奋。安排好时间，仔细策划每一步，然后解决每一步遇到的问题，他们步步为赢。起点在哪里并不重要，重要的事速度和质量。有了速度和质量，就可以达到既定的目标。

还有一批人，他们看不到时间的存在。这些人绝大部分属于消费者。这是好事，有这些人存在才会有庞大的市场。他们会很感兴趣什么手机最“In”，什么相机最“Out”，还有最新的软件和其它数码产品。他们趋向于拥有最新产品的那种短暂快乐。而精英的任务，就是赶在他们的兴趣消逝之前推出更好的产品，然后再促进新一轮的消费。当我看到铺天盖地的数码产品的广告，我看到的是一个个工程师、项目管理者、市场策划、销售，还有售后服务的精英们，很让人恐惧，然后转为兴奋。这些市场的主导者们每天都会精神充沛，获得最新的市场情报，发布新的产品，制定新的价格。这是商业的战争，这是战争的艺术；我喜欢这样的战争，我喜欢这样的艺术。

如果你还没有开始准备加入这场战争的话，请开始认真准备一下。如果你不知道如何开始的话，风险投资家盖 川崎（Guy Kawasaki）有一些答案：

I’ve just heard another friend complaining that he is unhappy about his current life. He said it’s just too boring, although he plays basketball every week and does a great job in his research. He asked me, what makes you happy?

I don’t have a complete set of answers to this question yet. But for sure I know one of them. I think part of happiness comes from the fact how many people you’ve influenced. The definition of influence is quite broad here. In general, it is that someone makes a decision because of you. Tomas Edison must be happy, as everyone is using light bulbs originally invented by him. Charlie Chaplin must be happy, as his comedies made everyone laugh. Or it doesn’t has to be a large group of people to be influenced; maybe just one or two. For instance, sing a stupid song to someone sad; or write blogs someone reads every other day. Take few seconds to count the number, you will feel better.

I read news everyday, mostly from online. News are not limited to just news websites, but also various blogs. I use live.com as my aggregator and let me take a look what I have there. OK, for English I have MSDN Blogs, MSN Auto News and /.. I also have non-web-based way to get news. P-I Reader from Seattle Post-Intelligencer is such a great application for me to know what is happening around the world and local.

Beside getting to know what’s new, I read news also for learning more vocabularies, since English is just my second language. Whenever I see some word never seen, I just shoot it to en-cn@hotmail.com in my Live Messenger for translation. This dictionary bot is convenient. However, it is not efficient for learning new words particularly. (I just typed the word ‘particularly’ in the wrong chat window. I’m sorry! 😛 ) And just now, an idea came out of my mind.

Alright, here is the scenario. When a web browser or some other reader-like application is first brought up, it automatically highlights all the words shown in the screen. When user reads the page, he/she clicks on the word he/she already know, so the highlight of that word dismisses. This could be annoying at early stage, since not many words have been clicked. But once a word is clicked, it will never be highlighted again. So after a while, there is going to be only those vocabularies this user doesn’t know highlighted in the screen.

Of course, to do this there has to be backend database to store all the words that have been clicked. And it only applies to languages whose phrases are delimited by spaces. A counter example is Chinese. It doesn’t matter to me, since I am learning English only. A difficulty of designing this tool is how to integrate the word highlighting and clicking into the existing applications. Maybe just do it on HTML-engine based applications? I don’t know.

软件工程里有一句著名的考核你的代码质量的名句，那就是 “Something bad will never happen. Something good will eventually happen.” 也就是说你写的代码所涉及的状态一定都被你全部想到过，所以不应该到达一个你不能处理的状态；同时，如果你到达了一个不太好的状态，在一定时间之后总会脱离这个状态，回到正轨。这条定律在我大四做乐高导航车毕业设计的时候，给了我极大的帮助。比如，如果小车发现在行驶了五分钟之后身上的感应器一个都没有被触发过的话，那么一定是车体被卡住了。所以只有马达在动，身体却原地不动。这个时候，代码就应该保证 “Something good will eventually happen”。于是小车停止前进，而是随即尝试后退、左转、右转等动作，以达到逃脱的目的。就这样，毕业设计总算是及格了。

之后，我把这句话当成了真理，用它来保证我得人生质量。做任何事情，都要把各种结果想到，来保证 Something bad will never happen；同时，如果发现自己的状态处于低谷，那么就应该尝试新的东西，来保证 Something good will eventually happen。本科毕业后，当我发现我所学到的编程知识并不能很好地和我所学到的软件工程知识所结合，我决定应该是做些改变的时候了。我做了两件事，一件是决定读研究僧；一件是尝试把信仰从一个集市操作系统提升到软件开发和构架上。其实这也是没过多久之前的事情，但是作为一个学习计算机科目的学生来看，这是成长的必经之路。

软件，工具也。这样一个很简单的事实，有些人却不明白。当我们的计算机里面安装了各种各样的应用程序、办公软件，我们却往往人为地在这些产品之间周转。我受到一封电子邮件；我需要根据邮件内容的要求召开一个下星期一的五人会议；我需要打开我的字处理软件，写好我准备开会的内容；同时我需要取出这个文档的一部分大纲做成一个问卷，并找到 30 个人的回复；然后把问卷反馈重新放回这个文档；我需要打开我的演示制作软件，跟我我的大纲把主要内容变成一个个投影。如果这是一个制定产品最新定价的会议，之后我还要把新的定价变成一个个精美的报价表，然后分发到每一个经销商去……一个多么痛苦的不以人为本的过程！其中绝大部分环节完全可以通过软件来自动化。每个环节所浪费的时间可能只有十秒钟，但是滴雨成海。如果这是一个企业的话，这种浪费毫无疑问是奢侈的。

这种以人为本的概念，很多公司都在做。2006年，这四个字在微软被翻译成 People Ready。这个概念很符合我的想法。有些人对这个公司的很多技术不是很了解，比如最受嘲笑的就是 IE 浏览器下的 ActiveX Control。可是恰恰因为有了这样的技术，上级通过浏览器、邮件客户端发布的信息才有可能加以自动化。确实，想符合上面以人为本这种生产模型，我们必须尽最大的可能结合现有的技术，来减少信息流动所带来的延迟。而专门针对减少这种延迟的技术却往往要经过很多安全性上面的考验。所以在技术发展的初期，往往会因为缺少足够的经验以导致漏洞的发生。可是我们一定要因为安全性而像鸵鸟般把头扎在毫无生气但是绝对安全的沙盘里么？安全性和易用性不应该是拔河比赛，并且任何一个极端都是人们不想考虑的。平衡好这个天平，以人为本的想法才可以实现。这两个方面合起来就是软件质量。提高软件的质量并不是不可能的，这就需要程序员们在格式上、协议上、操作模型上不断加以验证和改进。在验证和改进的过程里，只要合理合法，应该是什么平台和概念都可以拿来用的；不一定要求是某种操作系统，不一定要求实某种浏览器。

2006 年愚人节，我拿到了这个公司的一个职位。职衔为测试软件开发工程师，产品为　People Ready 计划的一部分。同年 11 月，这个公司推出由通信、演示、工作流程三大模块组成的 .Net Framework 3。也是在读了一年半硕士研究生之后，我又暂时辍学了，来到了一个叫做 Redmond 的小村庄。（上、中、下）

I just want to share a piece of news that my schoolmates Li, Zhe and Li, Xuan have just got their job offers from this company.

Why I am so happy? Well, having been working here for more than 3 months. I’ve hearing groups of people talking about where they came from and they always find their alumni. I met people from Standford U; I met people from U of Washington; I met people from Carnegie Mellon U. But unfortunately, no one from my university.

Now it seems that this situation is changing. It’s from east to west. It’s from Tim Horton’s to Starbucks. It’s from Hamilton to Redmond. It’s from McMaster U to Microsoft. Congratulations!

Last week I bought a second hand 19″ Samsung SyncMaster 940BW from http://expo.live.com for $100. But it’s not a replacement of my old display. I just extend my desktop to it so I can have more screen space to use.

I put my HP Pavilion dv2040ca at the left hand side to make it looking cool. Then I installed Synergy from http://synergy2.sf.net . It is a great tool which allows me to further extend my mouse/keyboard input to the laptop.

Now I am playing this Quake3 based game from http://www.worldofpadman.com . At the same time I have my IMs and Outlook 2007 running at the sides. Ah, degenerated life…